Campers sitting around the fire and people having backyard barbecues often like to toast marshmallows to snack on or to make a dessert known as a smore. A smore is a thin piece of chocolate and a toasted marshmallow between two graham cracker halves. These people enjoy a perfectly toasted marshmallow which is completely melted on the inside and golden brown on the outside. Getting the outside done is fairly easy since the exterior surface of the marshmallow is visible and therefore can be seen getting browner as the marshmallow is toasted. Detecting the toasting state of the inside of the marshmallow is more difficult, and the lack of a reliable or discernable method for determining when the inside of the marshmallow is substantially or completely melted often results in the outside of the marshmallow being burned, the inside not being sufficiently melted, or the inside being melted to a state that the entire marshmallow slides off of the utensil being used to toast the marshmallow over a heat source, such as a campfire. Furthermore, for those people who like the “perfect” smore, it is difficult to get the marshmallow sufficiently melted so the chocolate inside the smore melts and blends with the melted marshmallow.
One traditional utensil for toasting marshmallows over a campfire is a sharpened tree branch. These utensils are capable of supporting a marshmallow impaled thereupon, but are not sanitary to eat from, may catch fire, and do not provide an indication of the state of melt of the marshmallow. Other traditional utensils include cooking or eating forks, metal barbecue skewers and disassembled coat hangers. These utensils may be an improvement over sticks because they are more sanitary and do not catch fire; but they tend to conduct heat back toward a user's hand and/or too quickly melt the inside of the marshmallow due to the conducted heat. Perhaps more importantly, and similar to sharpened sticks, these do not provide a visual indication of the state of melt of the inside of a marshmallow.
Additional examples of utensils for cooking or toasting marshmallows or other food over campfires are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,742,840 to Cogswell, U.S. Pat. No. 3,745,910 to Delamater, U.S. Pat. No. 3,760,501 to Johnston, U.S. Pat. No. 4,126,086 to Valade, U.S. Pat. No. 4,539,751 to Chan, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,117,558 to Hull, the complete disclosures of which are hereby incorporated by reference for all purposes. These patents disclose hand-held forks that are used for impaling food for barbecuing or open fire cooking. However, these utensils merely provide support to the food to be cooked, and similar to the above-discussed utensils, do not provide an indication of the state of melt of a marshmallow. Similarly, because these utensils are designed to support meat products, there is the possibility of cross-contamination if the utensil is used to cook meat and then to toast a marshmallow. These examples are potentially cleaner and safer than a stick, yet do nothing more than hold the food to be cooked, leaving the user to guess when the cooking is done. Thus, by not knowing when the inside of a marshmallow is melted, the outside may be burned and the inside may be either over or under heated.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,744,403 to Castronuovo discloses an electric marshmallow toasting device that resembles an electric toaster oven. Accordingly, this structure is designed for use in an interior setting and certainly is not designed for use in more remote environments or to support a marshmallow over an open heat source, such as a campfire. Furthermore, the device of Castronuovo still does not provide any visual indication of the state of melt of the inside of a marshmallow. Accordingly, a need exists for a utensil that is adapted to support marshmallows to be toasted and which indicates when the inside of the marshmallow is melted.
An earlier version of the marshmallow-toasting utensils disclosed herein is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,906,052, the complete disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.